There exists a need to increase the ability to view and to interpret a persons physical environment, e.g. for blind or partially blind people, for air force pilots that have to guide a firearm with a “joy stick” trigger while driving a fighter aircraft, for persons enjoying complicated computer games with a growing amount of visual information, for car driving etc.
Hereby a need to combine the human visual system with tactile sensory information is evident in order to increase the human ability to interpret and make more complete decisions upon received real world information.
It has been suggested to develop means for blind persons to read through a tactile sensing in their finger tips, so called Braille reading, using raised-dot patterns for visual letters. There exists more sophisticated instrumentation which converts printed letters recorded by a hand-held camera to enlarged vibrotactile letter on a users fingerpad.
There are also systems that converts an image from a television-type camera to a matrix of electrotactile or vibrotactile stimulators on the abdomen, forehead or fingertip, in order to enable spatial orientation beyond the reach of a hand or long cane. Those systems are only experimental and they do not give any detailed information about objects in the surroundings.
Present systems do not give any information about moving objects or an emotional state of a person during a conversation, which both are important objectives, for example, to a blind or partially blind person.
Air force pilots do guide their firearms with a joy stick or handle adjusting a cross hair to a target on a screen in order to press a fire button at the right moment, and at the same time driving their fighter plane in high speeds. Hence, there is a need to aid a pilot's visual perception in order to improve concentration on the driving of a plane.
Persons playing computer games often use joysticks while watching a screen or display, displaying the games, for example, car race games. A persons visional neural system is then limited and the amount of visual information is large. In order to develop more complicated computer games, the rate of visual information has to be increased, thus providing a greater stress to persons playing said games.
Patent application document DE 43 37 602 A1 describes a dynamic orientation aid and a television simulator for blind people, operating with real time tactile feedback controlled through a computer.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,636,038 by Lynt et al. discloses an apparatus for converting visual images into a tactile representation. It is aimed to be used by visually impaired people.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,654,477 by Benjamin discloses an obstacle detection system for blind mounted on spectacle frames.
None of the cited documents teaches how to enhance a seeing persons visual perception. It is inevitable that a device that enhances visual perception for seeing persons can also be used by visually impaired people.